Switzerland’s history is one of a medieval defensive league formed during a time and in an area lacking imperial authority. The different cantons (traditionally called Orte in German) were to a large extent independent states that remained united through the shared defense of liberty, which was understood as the protection of imperial privileges and franchises. Unlike all similar confederations (e.g., the Hanseatic and Swabian leagues) and despite endemic internal strife, especially after the Reformation in the 16th century, the Swiss Confederation survived the formation of (princely) modern states without adapting to it. With Venice, Genoa, and the Netherlands, the confederation formed the republican exception in Europe, and it developed political structures less as a unified nation than on the level of the 13 cantons that the Swiss Confederation comprised by the time of the Reformation. The early modern confederation also included, with reduced say, the Zugewandte Orte, districts and towns (such as Geneva and Graubünden) that were allied to and subsequently became a party of the confederation. Switzerland was (along with San Marino) the only early modern republic to survive the reign of Napoleon I. It modernized its political structures in its 1848 constitution, successfully adopting liberal principles such as individual rights, separation of powers, and parliamentary bicameralism enshrined in the French Revolution (1789) and the U.S. Constitution. In the preceding period of crisis from the end of the 18th century to the mid-19th century, the confederation integrated the French- and Italian-speaking cantons and large rural areas, which earlier had been dominions of oligarchic or democratic regimes. Thus, Switzerland avoided breaking apart like other traditional states on mountain ridges such as Navarre or Savoy, which were destroyed by the idea of “natural boundaries,” or the Habsburg empire, which was eventually torn apart and reduced to its German element by those espousing nationalism. A product of the European balance of power and, after 1499, attacked only once (1798), Switzerland has enjoyed peace for most of its existence and was spared from two world wars in the 20th century, when the gradually developed concept of “armed neutrality” was respected by its neighbours. Economic prosperity largely followed as Switzerland adapted well to the Industrial Revolution and the growth of international finance markets, despite internal social strife in the decades around the turn of the 20th century.

Switzerland before confederation

Prehistoric Switzerland

Until the late Middle Ages, the territory constituting modern Switzerland never formed a single political or cultural unit. The first stone implements discovered in Switzerland are more than 250,000 years old, and early human Neanderthal hunting settlements date from about 50,000 BC. During the last glacial period in Alpine Europe, the Würm stage, which began about 70,000 years ago, the country was covered with ice, many thousands of feet deep, that flowed down from the Alps. Animal figures carved on antlers and bones (e.g., those found in Kesslerloch date from about 10,000 BC) prove that during interglacial periods nomadic hunters had camps in caves of the ice-free areas of the Jura and the Mittelland and followed their prey, mainly reindeer and bear, into the high mountain valleys. Toward the end of the Würm, about 12,000 BC, Homo sapiens appeared; after the melting of the glaciers, Neolithic cultures established corn (maize) growing and animal breeding in parts of the Rhône and Rhine valleys (about 5000 BC). From about 1800 BC, Bronze Age settlements were scattered throughout the Mittelland and Alpine valleys.

Celtic Switzerland

During the Iron Age, from about 800 BC on, the area that was to become Switzerland was inhabited by Celts in the west and Raetians in the east. A rough boundary between the tribes ran from Lake Constance to the San Bernardino by way of the Linth valley. Much of what is now known about the Celts in western Europe during the period from approximately 400 to 50 BC was pieced together from information and artifacts gleaned from excavations at the lakeside encampment of La Tène, near the modern city of Neuchâtel. The Celts were noted for their metalwork, original ceramics, and superb jewelry crafted from gold. They first lived on single farms or in villages (of about 400 inhabitants, according to Caesar), and later they established larger towns (oppidum). Most of the cities of the Swiss Mittelland and of the transverse Alpine valleys were originally settled by Celts.

The Helvetii, one of the most powerful of the Celtic tribes, controlled much of the area between the Jura and the Alps. Because of pressures from Germanic tribes, they attempted to migrate to southwestern Gaul in 58 BC but were denied permission by the Romans. Defeated by Julius Caesar at Bibracte (modern Mont Beuvray, France) in the opening campaign of the Gallic Wars, the Helvetii survivors returned to their Swiss lands as dependent but privileged allies (foederati) of Rome and thus filled a vacuum that otherwise might have precipitated further Germanic encroachment.

Roman Switzerland

Caesar Augustus annexed present-day Switzerland to the Roman Empire in 15 BC. The Romans enlarged old Celtic settlements or built new military camps and towns, such as Augusta Raurica (now Augst), on the Rhine east of Basel; Genava, Julia Equestris (Nyon), and Lousonna (Lausanne), on the shores of Lake Geneva; Aventicum (Avenches), near Lake Morat; Eburodunum (Yverdon), on the southwest shore of Lake Neuchâtel; and Vindonissa (Windisch) and Turicum (Zürich), where the Limmat flows north out of Lake Zürich (Zürichsee). The Romans improved water supplies and constructed arenas and theatres, the best examples of which may be seen at Augst and Avenches. Villas, a type of fortified farmstead, were built, providing bases for agricultural exploitation and for spreading Roman influence into the surrounding countryside.

New fruits, plants, and vegetables were brought from the south. The grapevine was introduced despite attempts by Roman legislators to prevent wine from being produced north of the Alps. To facilitate increasing exports of wheat, cattle, and cheese, as well as to provide better lines of communication for military purposes, roads connecting Rome and the northern outposts of the empire were extended and improved across the Mittelland. The pass routes—especially the Great Saint Bernard in the west, between Octodurum (Martigny) and Augusta Praetoria (Aosta), and the San Bernardino, Splügen, Septimer, and Julier passes that linked the upper Rhine valley with the south of Switzerland—were enlarged from trails to narrow paved roads. In the peaceful period from AD 101 to 260, few Roman troops remained in Switzerland, and the economy and culture blossomed under civil Roman administration; Romanization was particularly strong in the western and southern part of the region and in Raetia in the east. By the 4th century Christianity had started to spread among the inhabitants; the legend of the “Theban Legion”—martyrs allegedly executed near Saint-Maurice in the Valais—would leave its mark on the Christian identity in many Swiss towns.

Germanic invasions

The first of the Germanic incursions occurred in AD 259–260 after the Roman limes (fortified strips of land that served as military barriers to invaders) fell. Although the Romans were able to temporarily reestablish the border at the Rhine, by AD 400 Roman Switzerland had disintegrated, and the lands of the Romanized Celts were occupied by Germanic tribes such as the Burgundians, Alemannians, and Langobardians (in Ticino). Few in number, the Burgundians occupied the lands of western Switzerland. They retained political control in Switzerland but lost contact with their former homelands and were assimilated into the Roman Celtic population. The French-speaking part of present-day Switzerland is approximately the territory settled by the Burgundians from the 5th century onward.

Large-scale migrations of Alemannians penetrated south of the Rhine during the 6th and 7th centuries. More numerous than the Burgundians and in direct contact with their kin north of the Rhine, the Alemannians colonized lands that had been only partially under Roman influence, which thus facilitated the imposition of their culture and language on the Celts. From the 6th to the 13th century, Germanic hegemony slowly penetrated westward from the Reuss River to the Sarine. The Alemannians also pushed farther into the upper Rhine valley, driving the Celts deeper into the Alps. Today in the valleys of the Graubünden (Grisons), the descendants of these Celts speak Romansh, the least-prevalent of Switzerland’s four official languages.

During the late 5th and early 6th centuries, Burgundians and Alemannians came under the control of the Franks and thus became part of Charlemagne’s resuscitated Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century. The Burgundians already were Roman Catholic, but the Franks let Irish and Scottish monks do missionary work among the Alemannians; the followers of one Irish monk, St. Gall, established a monastic settlement that became the town of Sankt Gallen. By erecting new churches and imposing their own counts and bishops, the Franks integrated the territory that later became Switzerland into the Carolingian empire. But less than 30 years after Charlemagne’s death, the Treaty of Verdun (843) divided his empire, including Switzerland, among his grandsons. The middle kingdom of Lothar I included the Burgundian settlement area west of the Aare River; it became part of an independent Burgundian kingdom that lasted until 1033, when it again joined the Holy Roman Empire. Alemannia, north and south of the Rhine, and Raetia were assigned in 843 to the East Frankish kingdom of Louis II (the German). By 1000 the Swiss territories belonged to 12 different bishoprics, the largest of which were Lausanne, Konstanz (Constance), Sion, and Chur.

Dynastic Switzerland

The Swiss area became united again in the 11th century under the Holy Roman Empire with its German emperors; however, the remoteness and the gradual decline of the imperial power allowed the rise of quasi-independent territories out of bailiwicks. This process enabled the feudal dynasties of the Zähringen, Savoy, Kyburg, and Habsburg families to concentrate rudimentary administrative and judicial powers in their own hands by the beginning of the 13th century. In the High Middle Ages these families founded monasteries and new cities to provide secure stopping places for the increasing numbers of merchants participating in the rapidly expanding trade of western Europe. By 1300 some 200 towns existed in what would become Switzerland, but only a few of them acquired major significance. Many of the fortified places had several functions: providing a source of revenue, offering a centre for (juridical) administration, defending newly acquired territories, and serving as an outpost for further dynastic expansion. Conflict with the Savoys prompted the Zähringens to found strategically located towns such as Bern, sited on the easily defended great bend of the Aare River; Fribourg, located on a loop of the entrenched Sarine River where a key trade route crossed the river; and the walled city of Murten (Morat), which became the dynasty’s western outlier. Under the Kyburgers, who were established in northeastern Switzerland, the settlements of Winterthur, Zug, Aarau, and Baden received town status. In the west the Savoys extended their domain from Geneva to Moudon and Yverdon, on the western end of Lake Neuchâtel, and up the Rhône valley into Valais.

By the mid-13th century, the Zähringers and Kyburgers had died out, and, after driving the Savoys back to the Vaud, the Habsburgs emerged as the dominant family in Switzerland. Their original castle, built in 1020, was strategically situated within a few miles of the confluence of the Aare, Reuss, and Limmat rivers in order to control east-west routes across the Mittelland and north-south passages through the Saint Gotthard Pass, along with the waterways of Lakes Walen and Zürich. The expansion of Habsburg influence and territory, facilitated by the royal dignity of Rudolf I (1273–91), the first German king of the Habsburg dynasty, eventually led to a confrontation with some small, relatively autonomous communities within central Switzerland and ultimately to the establishment of the Swiss Confederation, which was the result of a clash between two contrasting models for establishing public peace (Landfriede): the territorial rule of the high nobility or a federation of rural and urban communes.

The Swiss Confederation during the Late Middle Ages

The foundation of the confederation

The communities of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden were populated by a large number of free peasants. Originally, secular or ecclesiastic lords had sent them to clear the woods and cultivate the land in the severe environmental conditions of the Alpine valleys. Problems relating to the use of pasturelands, overgrazing, the cutting of forests, and natural disasters such as landslides, floods, and avalanches were too complex for any one person or family to solve. Far away from their overlords, these peasants formed relatively independent communities (Talgenossenschaften), in which assemblies of all free men (Landsgemeinden) elected their own leaders (Landammann) from among the local oligarchy. Solemn oaths held these communities together, and stockbreeding procured considerable income. Their relative autonomy was strengthened by the Hohenstaufen kings and emperors, who privileged these rural communes and made them immediate subjects of the crown in order to keep free the roads between Swabia and Italy, especially the Saint Gotthard Pass, which was made accessible after 1200 by the construction of daring bridges. As contestants for the empire and rulers of the northern approach to Saint Gotthard, the house of Habsburg showed growing interest in the same area.

In 1291, when Rudolf I of Habsburg died, the elites of the Waldstätte (“forest cantons”) Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden renewed an older treaty confirming that they would maintain public peace and efficient jurisdiction without interference from outside, thus securing their privileged position. Such pacts were common at that time, but this one was to be considered much later as the foundation of the Swiss Confederation (only since 1891 has August 1, 1291, been celebrated as the birth of the nation). The accounts of William Tell and of the foundation of the confederation in the Rütli meadow by the shore of Lake Lucerne are legendary products as well, but they date from the late 15th century. Within the empire the three Waldstätte sided with the Habsburgs’ rivals; Henry VII of Luxembourg confirmed direct imperial rule over the region in 1309, as later did Ludwig of Bavaria. In the Battle of Morgarten in 1315, the peasant foot soldiers of the forest cantons defeated an army of armoured Austrian knights sent against them in response to attacks on the wealthy monastery of Einsiedeln (near Lake Zürich). After the victory the league of 1291 was confirmed and extended; in matters of foreign relations, consultation among the members became compulsory.

What would distinguish the Swiss Confederation from the many other leagues in Europe was the fact that it united equally entitled rural and urban communes, both of which had acquired autonomy from local seigneurs (bishops or bailiffs). The economic strength of the Swiss towns, whose merchants traveled to Venice, Cracovia (Kraków), Antwerp, Lyon, and other commercial centres, gradually eliminated the power and influence of the feudal nobility, such as the counts of Greyerz or Toggenburg, who depended on a rural economy that was particularly shaken by the crisis of the Late Middle Ages (pestilence, crop failures, and famine). Indeed, the standard of living of the nobles scarcely differed from that of their more affluent subjects, especially after the Black Death that plagued Europe after 1348—reducing the Swiss population by about one-fourth—enabled wealthier peasants to cultivate more land. During that period the towns bought land and seigneurial rights from indebted nobles and thus acquired territory of their own, where they subjugated the population in the manner of the feudal lords. By becoming burghers of the towns and often even residing there, the lower nobles found themselves officers of a more efficient urban administration that sought to use regular jurisdiction in replacement of feudal warfare and to guarantee safe and rational conditions for commercial expansion. For the same purpose, the Swiss towns successfully aimed for the privileges enjoyed by free imperial towns and united into leagues, such as Bern’s Burgundian Confederation, or pursued special regional relationships, such as Zürich’s orientation toward Swabia and Basel’s focus on the Rhine region.

The expansion of the Swiss Confederation followed the same logic, promising help against foreign and internal dangers. Sometimes joining the confederation was the result of discord within a town; for example, Zürich became a member of the alliance in 1351 after a revolution by the guilds against the pro-Habsburg nobility. In the resulting treaty, common arbitration was first established as a means to settle conflicts between the cantons. By 1332 Lucerne had entered the league; Zug and Glarus became allies in 1352 for the first time but permanent members only in 1365 and 1388, respectively. Although these cantons were direct neighbours of the forest cantons, Bern, which joined in 1353, was located in and oriented toward the west. The new members strengthened the confederation by providing additional revenues, labour, and political and strategic capacities. With decisive military victories at the Battles of Sempach (1386) and Näfels (1388), the confederation pushed back the Habsburgs’ pretensions and further weakened the power and reputation of the local nobility dependent on them. About the same time, two joint concordats were concluded: the Pfaffenbrief (Pastors’ Ordinance, 1370), which protected passage along the Saint Gotthard Pass, prevented private feuds, and governed the relationship between secular and religious authorities, and the Sempacherbrief (Agreement of Sempach, 1393), which was to prevent private warfare by imposing common rules on all members of the league.

Expansion and position of power

The expansion of the Swiss Confederation between the Battles of Sempach and Marignano (1515) caught the attention of the European powers. The military strength of the confederation was founded on a militia of young people that was difficult to lead and often practiced blackmail or ravage but that stuck together in danger and developed a successful model for fighting knights with lances. Politically, non-Habsburg emperors—especially Sigismund (1368–1437), the king of Hungary, Germany, Bohemia, and Lombard and the Holy Roman emperor—granted privileges to the confederates, confirming their status as imperial towns and free communities. Thus, “turning Swiss” became an option for those German entities that disliked princely and usually Habsburgian territorial rule. Without becoming full members of the confederation, rural areas such as Appenzell (1411), republican towns such as Sankt Gallen (1454), Schaffhausen (1454), Mulhouse in Alsace (1466), and Rottweil in Swabia (1463), princes of the church such as the abbots of Sankt Gallen (1451), and the two other confederations of rural communities, the Valais and the Graubünden, eventually adopted the status of Swiss allies (Zugewandte). These allies took part in several wars and were invited to the meetings of the Diet (Tagsatzung), but, unlike the regular members, they neither possessed a full vote nor shared in the administration of the joint dependencies (gemeine Herrschaften). These dependencies were governed alternately by those cantons that had conquered them. As even the regular members were connected by many separate bilateral or multilateral treaties with different rules, Switzerland was really only a network of alliances rather than a state until 1798.

Nevertheless, beginning in the 15th century, the confederation gradually became a power of order in the neighbouring area, even though it usually did not act as a whole, but only those cantons that were directly involved became politically active. Thus, it was mainly Schwyz that intervened in favour of Appenzell against the abbot of Sankt Gallen, while Uri followed its designs on territory south of the Alps. But, initially lacking the support of other cantons, it was prevented in the early 15th century from expanding into Italian-speaking Ticino by the viscount of Milan. In 1415, during the ecumenical Council of Constance, Sigismund invited the Swiss to weaken Frederick IV, the Habsburg supporter of an antipope, and conquer his ancestral territory, Aargau (Argovie), which had separated Zürich from Lucerne and Bern. Thus, Aargau became the confederation’s first joint dependency. From 1424 (until 1712) the Diet became regular and assembled in the Argovian town of Baden to discuss common affairs and especially the administration of joint dependencies.

Soon after, in the eastern part of present-day Switzerland, the ambitions of Zürich, which invited Austrian and French support, clashed with those of Schwyz, which found support with the other confederates. In the bitter Old Zürich War, which erupted in the late 1430s, Schwyz and its allies thwarted Zürich’s attempt to gather a territory under the protection of its legitimate Austrian overlord and brought the city back into the internal balance of powers within Switzerland. Peace was finally restored in 1450, when Zürich renounced the Austrian alliance and Schwyz gained control of territory on the southern shore of Lake Zürich. While Zürich’s expansionist aims thus were blocked in the south, it purchased suzerainty over the town of Winterthur in the east (1467). In 1460 Pope Pius II entitled the Swiss to conquer Thurgau, another Habsburg territory in the east, near Lake Constance, which as a result became a joint dependency.

With the conquest of Thurgau and especially as a result of the Burgundian War (1474–77), Switzerland became a dynamic European power for half a century. Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, had tried to establish an empire extending from the Netherlands to the Mediterranean and gradually gained control of pawned Austrian territory from Alsace to the Rhine towns of Rheinfelden and Waldshut. Along the upper Rhine, Strasbourg, Basel, and Mulhouse sought support against Burgundian pressure and found it in Bern, whose commercial routes toward the west and north seemed endangered. Backed by an unprecedented peace and alliance with the Habsburgs and by the machinations of France’s Louis XI, the confederates won a series of spectacular encounters, including those at Grandson, Murten, and Nancy (1476–77). Charles the Bold eventually was killed, which ended his attempt to resurrect the Lotharingian empire and benefited France and especially the Habsburg heritors of the Netherlands.

The victory over Burgundy strengthened the position of the cities within the Swiss Confederation that wanted to welcome their wartime allies Fribourg and Solothurn into the league. The proposed expansion provoked a major crisis between the rural and urban oligarchies, which already had clashed over the Burgundian booty and generally had different interests. The towns were oriented toward commerce and interested in a more effective subjection of the countryside, which led to peasant uprisings such as those against Hans Waldmann, the burgomaster and virtual dictator of Zürich in the 1480s. The rural cantons sympathized with these peasants and also tolerated undisciplined freebooting; furthermore, these rather poor areas became even more dependent than the urban elites on the revenue generated by the increasingly professionalized mercenary system that supplied Switzerland’s renowned troops to the princes of Europe. Owing to the mediation of the hermit Nicholas of Flüe, the Diet of Stans (1481) agreement was reached, averting civil war by allowing Fribourg and Solothurn to join the Swiss Confederation, banning private war. The towns were required to renounce the separate alliance they had formed and to seek approval by the confederation for any future alliance that they might negotiate. This compact—the so-called Stanser Verkommnis (Contracts of Stans)—remained one of the very few treaties to include all of the cantons and was regularly renewed. Indeed, no common constitution existed prior to 1798.

In 1495 Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and the imperial Diet of Worms imposed a public peace and a Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber of Justice), which served as the empire’s supreme court. Like other peripheral regions, the Swiss Confederation opposed the intensification of the authority of the Habsburg ruler. Tensions also increased because of the antagonism between Swiss and Swabian mercenaries and a series of predatory excursions by both. The confederates were accused of being sacrilegious enemies of the nobility and true order. In 1499 Maximilian joined with the Swabian League, an alliance of southern German princes, knights, and cities organized to maintain public peace, and attacked the Swiss ally Graubünden, thus igniting the Swabian (or Swiss) War. After several battles in Graubünden and along the Rhine from Basel to the Vorarlberg, peace was declared at Basel on September 22, 1499; the Swiss Confederation did not adhere to the decisions of Worms, but it remained a subject of the empire even though there was little effective control left. Within two years the strategic Rhine territories of Basel and Schaffhausen joined the Swiss Confederation, and in 1513 Appenzell also became a full member.

Following the Swabian conflict, Switzerland was drawn into the struggle between the Holy Roman emperor, France, Spain, and the Italian powers over control of the duchy of Milan. The Swiss had more than a passing interest in this area, having followed Uri and extended their control into the southern Alpine valleys while fighting against the Milanese during the 15th century. The elites of the cantons were divided according to their contrasting foreign sympathies and the bribes they received for selling mercenary troops. At first the Swiss supported France, but later they joined the alliance led by the pope to drive the French out of Italy. In September 1515 a disunited Swiss force was decisively defeated on the fields of Marignano southeast of Milan, losing some 10,000 infantrymen in a battle against the French army, which used recently invented artillery and a modern cavalry.

The terms of the peace settlement of 1516 with French King Francis I were generous to the vanquished Swiss Confederation, which kept most of present-day Ticino as a joint dependency, while the Valtellina was accorded to the Graubünden. The goodwill generated by the peace terms and the mercenary pact of 1521 resulted in more than 250 years of accord between the former belligerents and had important economic consequences for Switzerland, giving confederate merchants access to the large French market. Although the traditional trade with the empire and Italian states continued, France became, in keeping with the general shift of commerce toward the Atlantic countries, the main market for Swiss products (principally textiles and cheese and later books, jewelry, and watches) until the French Revolution.

The defeat at Marignano marked the end of Switzerland’s role as a European power and eventually—but not intentionally—led to a politics of neutrality. Its political structure as a federation of independent states no longer could match the efficiency and resources of the growing united monarchies. In particular, a common and active foreign policy became impossible as the Reformation added another dimension to the heterogeneity of the confederation, already split because of different regional interests and especially the opposition of rural and urban cantons. Nevertheless, the Swiss Confederation had shown more signs of institutional consolidation and cultural similarity in the 15th century than it would in the three following centuries. By 1500 it had established a historiographical tradition and a sense of itself as a political entity based on its shared topography and history; moreover, foreigners regarded it as an entity.

The ancien régime

The Reformation

Switzerland’s then biggest town, Basel, became a cultural centre as a result of the Council of Basel (1431–49), the foundation of its university (1460), and its printing industry, which attracted famed Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus, whose Christian philosophy became the heart of humanism in Switzerland. One of Erasmus’s most eager pupils was Huldrych Zwingli, an influential theologian and a dynamic political leader whose new Protestant religious doctrines, paralleling to some extent those of Martin Luther, fueled the Swiss Reformation. Against what he viewed as the decadent Roman Catholic hierarchy, Zwingli favoured the return to the teachings of the Bible. While Luther strictly separated the spiritual and political realms, Zwingli emphasized that both the church and the state were subject to the law of Christ. In 1525 Zürich’s great council adopted his innovations: the Latin mass was replaced by a simple communion service; a German-language bible was introduced; the clergy were allowed to marry; the church’s land property was secularized and its jurisdiction heavily restricted; and images were destroyed or withdrawn from the churches. Although supported by many peasants, the Swiss Reformation was most of all a success of the lay urban burghers and their councils, which took control of the spiritual and material power of the church and restrained the peasants, who in vain asked for the complete abolition of the tithe during the unrest of 1525. It was also in the countryside that the Anabaptists (believers of adult baptism) won most followers; refusing military service and the civic oath, they were cruelly suppressed well into the 18th century.

Zürich’s model was soon followed by other Swiss towns, especially those ruled by guilds such as Sankt Gallen, Basel, Biel, Mulhouse, and Schaffhausen and, after a public disputation in 1528, by patrician Bern. Yet, despite the presence of humanist supporters of the Reformation, the equally patrician towns of Fribourg, Solothurn, Lucerne, and Zug remained Roman Catholic. The most fervent opposition to the new faith came from central Switzerland’s rural cantons, which already controlled the local Roman Catholic church and depended heavily on the mercenary system that Zwingli had severely criticized and that Zürich’s council consequently had forbidden. In some rural areas with little central authority, the choice of religious denomination was left to individual communes, the majority of which adopted Protestantism. This occurred in both Glarus and Appenzell, the latter splitting along confessional lines into two half cantons in 1597. In Graubünden, too, the communes had free choice of adherence, and a majority chose Protestantism, while the Valais, after temporary success of the Reformers, was completely re-Catholicized later in the 17th century. Military confrontation over confessional preferences became inevitable within the joint dependencies, resulting in the Kappel Wars. In 1529 Protestant troops from Zürich and Bern advanced on the five Catholic cantons of central Switzerland (Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Lucerne, and Zug), which had joined to form the Christian Union, but little fighting occurred in this first conflict, thanks to the compromise symbolized by the famous Kappeler Milchsuppe, a soup of milk and bread shared on the front by the two opposing armies. In the conflict’s aftermath, Zwingli insisted on and used economic pressure to achieve the Reformation of the whole Swiss Confederation. The Second Kappel War began in October 1531, when the five Roman Catholic cantons launched an unexpected attack on Zürich, winning the decisive Battle of Kappel, in which Zwingli, serving as chaplain for Zürich’s forces, was killed.

The second peace of Kappel confirmed the territorial status quo, which essentially remained unchanged until the demographic movements of the 19th century. The result was an irregular pattern of Protestant and Roman Catholic areas, cutting across the boundaries of language and physical geography, which is still in evidence today.

In the western, French-speaking part of Switzerland, the Reformation coincided with Bern’s expansion to the disadvantage of Savoy. In 1536 Protestant Bern conquered the Vaud and thus decisively backed the Reformation not only there but also in Neuchâtel and Geneva. Thanks to John Calvin, the latter became the spiritual centre of Europe’s Reformed churches while successfully resisting several attempts by Savoy to reduce the town under ducal power. A number of Reformation leaders in Switzerland (e.g., Calvin, Theodore Beza, and Guillaume Farel) were among the many Huguenot refugees from France; moreover, Italian and even Spanish Protestants also fled to Switzerland, heavily contributing to the economic and cultural development of the French-speaking Calvinist and German-speaking Zwinglian towns that united in two common confessions—the Consensus Tigurinus (1549) and the Second Helvetic Confession (1566). The Roman Catholic cantons responded by forming a special league, the Golden (or Borromean) League, in 1586 and establishing an alliance with Spain in 1586–87.

Confessional equilibrium

At the national level, where there were almost no permanent common institutions other than the Diet, immobility was the result of the contrasting political and confessional options, which rendered impossible the accession of new cantons, though there was some interest from Geneva, Neuchâtel, and the Roman Catholic bishop of Basel. Yet, nobody dared to question the existing equilibrium, and for the same reason the cantons remained neutral during the Thirty Years’ War, despite pressure from religious leaders; only the Graubünden was almost torn apart between France and Spain during the Valtellina troubles (1620–39), involving Spain, Austria, and France. During the 17th-century wars of French king Louis XIV, neutrality gradually developed as an official maxim of the Swiss Confederation, both as a result of an institutionally weak foreign policy and as a way to avoid the internal strife inherent in the different loyalties of the various cantons. Neutrality, which de facto favoured France, also corresponded to the confederation’s new status as a sovereign republic after Basel’s burgomaster, Johann Rudolf Wettstein, obtained Switzerland’s exemption from the Holy Roman Empire in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

In the Diet, where every canton had an equal vote, and especially in most joint dependencies, which were governed by only the first eight members of the confederation, the Catholics had the majority despite a smaller population and comparatively less wealth. When Zürich and Bern attempted to gain supremacy in 1656, the five Roman Catholic cantons waged and won the first war of Villmergen in Aargau. In 1712, however, the same adversaries clashed in the second war of Villmergen, and this time the Protestants triumphed. Besides smaller changes in the joint dependencies, the confessional boundaries essentially were maintained, but the more economically prosperous Protestant towns now were also the incontestable political leaders in Switzerland.

In contrast to the weak political and military structures of the confederation, since the 15th century the oligarchies, especially in the towns, had been strengthening their power within their cantons. They expanded their administrative power especially in the domains of jurisdiction, taxes, and military conscription. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, the cities gradually stopped admitting new burghers and restricted access to the councils and official duties to a small group of oligarchic families. A similar process produced poor peasants without juridical rights in the rural cantons. The growing number of regulations and taxes was particularly resented in the countryside, where people usually invoked old privileges. Sporadic unrest climaxed in 1653 in a large peasant revolt that united Catholic and Protestant peasants, especially in Lucerne, Bern, and Basel, but was violently suppressed. Toward the end of the 17th century, the councils gradually considered and represented themselves as absolute sovereigns. Judged from the outside by Aristotelian criteria, they could be described variously as aristocracies (e.g., patrician towns such as Bern), democracies (e.g., the rural cantons with assemblies of all men), or a mixture of both (e.g., the towns ruled by guilds such as Basel); yet everywhere power was in the hands of elites who oriented themselves along the lines of French court life. But the model of and the alliance with the Protestant states (especially the Netherlands and England) increasingly became an alternative about the turn of the 18th century. Under these circumstances, the Protestant principality of Neuchâtel was inherited in 1707 by the Prussian king Frederick I rather than by a French prince favoured by Louis XIV.

The emergence of a modern state

Industrialization

In contrast to many surrounding regions, Switzerland experienced the 17th and 18th centuries as periods of peace and rising prosperity. Neutrality was beneficial to the economy, allowing the confederation to supply other countries with goods, and the influx of refugees, especially French Huguenots after their expulsion in 1685, was particularly important in rehabilitating old crafts and establishing new enterprises. By the 16th century French and Italian refugees had introduced watchmaking to Geneva, and by the late 18th century the city had some 1,000 master watchmakers and several thousand apprentices. Refugees were not instrumental in the founding of watchmaking in the canton of Neuchâtel, however; in the city itself, precision metallurgy was carried out as early as the 16th century, and specialists spread throughout the Jura, establishing this mountainous area as the major region of Swiss watchmaking.

Having accumulated mainly from the pensions of the mercenary system and from commercial sources, Swiss capital was desperately needed in those countries that constantly were at war, especially in France, and Genevan bankers became the centre of an extensive European financial network. Thanks to such benefits and without the costs of a court or a standing army, several towns were able to abolish the taxing of subjects in the 18th century. Thus, there was plenty of capital available to finance industrial expansion. Topography and historical parceling precluded the possibility of investing in large agricultural estates. In addition, natural resources did not exist in sufficient quantities for easy exploitation, and the cultivation of land could not support the rising population. Consequently, the Swiss Confederation benefited from the ample supply of labour available. Because landlocked Switzerland had no shipping enterprises or colonial possessions, industry was the natural target for economic development. Thus, by the end of the 18th century, about one-fourth of Switzerland’s working population was employed in industry, especially in the textile and watchmaking sectors. Owing to restrictions imposed by the guilds in the towns, this growth essentially occurred in the countryside; urban entrepreneurs provided raw materials to peasants, who were unable to subsist solely on their land and supplemented their incomes by spinning and weaving silk, linen, and especially cotton in their own cottages.

Since its origin in the 14th century, the manufacture of wool cloth had always been among the most important Swiss industries, but, after the demographic and economic crisis following the Black Death, textiles (excluding Sankt Gallen’s linen) did not blossom again until the 17th century, when refugees reestablished silk manufacture and later introduced fine spinning and muslin weaving. The free import of cheap machine-made thread from England sparked a last boom before the chaos of the French Revolution engulfed Switzerland, which was then among the most highly industrialized countries in Europe. The major producing regions were located in rural areas of the northeast, in proximity to Zürich–Winterthur and Sankt Gallen–Appenzell–Glarus, near sources of impounded water that provided mechanical energy for running the machines. In contrast, Bern and the Catholic cantons continued to rely primarily on agriculture. Rational commercial farming was introduced with some success, sometimes with the help of enlightened societies (such as those in Zürich and Bern).

The Helvetic Republic

Despite the Swiss Confederation’s economic expansion, its political institutions were poorly prepared to meet the forces set loose by the French Revolution: the 13 cantons had no central government; each had its own army; religious antagonisms persisted; the rural cantons were suspicious of the towns; the small cantons were jealous of the larger ones; the call for reforming the oligarchic and often corrupt hierarchies had been issued in several urban revolts during the 18th century, most frequently and intensely in Geneva, but was always violently repressed; and the more moderate propositions of the enlightened statesmen in the Helvetische Gesellschaft (Helvetic Society), a supraconfessional patriotic organization founded in 1761, met with similar refusal.

Although both pro- and anti-French feelings existed, Switzerland attempted to remain neutral during the French revolutionary wars. The country’s strategic position on the main Paris-Milan route via the Simplon Pass was vital for France, however, as was control of the Great Saint Bernard Pass. Thus, after Napoleon’s armies had conquered northern Italy, France invaded Switzerland and occupied Bern on March 5, 1798. Earlier the subjects in the Vaud and elsewhere had started to revolt against their urban lords, which thus revealed the impossibility of uniting the whole country against an often welcomed invader. Napoleon’s occupation effectively ended the ancient confederation of the 13 cantons and their allies.

Under French protection the Helvetic Republic, which lasted from 1798 to 1803, was established. For the first time in Swiss history, a constitution granted sovereignty to the people and provided individual rights and equality before the law; the subjects were liberated, and the Bernese and joint dependencies became cantons of their own. Although some former allies such as Sankt Gallen and the Graubünden joined the republic as full members, other cantons—Geneva, Neuchâtel, Valais, and the bishopric of Basel—were temporarily annexed by France. The unitary constitution, largely written by Peter Ochs, Basel’s chief master of the guilds, was modeled in Paris after the French constitution of 1795 and neglected the Swiss tradition of cantonal sovereignty. Opposition to the new state was strongest in central Switzerland, where Nidwalden’s revolt ended with a massacre. But even the supporters of the Helvetic Republic soon split into factions and fought each other in several coups d’état. Furthermore, the French treated Switzerland as a vassal state, plundering it and making it a battlefield in their conflicts with Austrian and Russian enemies. By the time French troops withdrew in 1803, Switzerland was plagued by civil war and anarchy, which prompted Napoleon to intervene with the Mediation Act; this stabilized the country without sacrificing the recently acquired individual rights. The 13 cantons were reestablished as near-sovereign states, and 6 new ones were created with full rights: Sankt Gallen, the Graubünden, Aargau, Thurgau, Ticino, and Vaud. During the rest of the Napoleonic Wars, the Swiss were bound to France by a defensive alliance, and several thousand Swiss soldiers died during Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Industry, especially textiles, suffered heavily from the continental blockade. In 1815, after Napoleon’s fall at the Battle of Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna handed over the Valtellina from Graubünden to Austria, but it added the three ancient allies of Valais, Neuchâtel, and Geneva to the Swiss Confederation, bringing its total to 22 cantons. Thus, the hopes of Bern and the Catholic cantons to reestablish the former dependencies were not realized, though Bern received Jura, the ancient bishopric of Basel, as compensation. Through the Second Treaty of Paris (1815), the European powers recognized and guaranteed the perpetual neutrality of the confederation.

Economic growth

Despite a major famine in 1816–17, a period of dramatic economic growth began after the Napoleonic Wars. There was a general improvement in agriculture, and tourism, especially from England, began to develop. But the industrial sector of the economy made the most significant gains, while still keeping its peasant character. The exclusion of the English from European markets by the wartime continental blockade, while initially detrimental to the textile industry, spurred the Swiss to modernize and to adopt mechanical spinning.

The first mechanized spinning mill was set up in Sankt Gallen in 1801, and the first large-scale plant was established a year later in the canton of Zürich. The cotton industry gave birth to the machine-fabricating industry, and both soon started exporting. By 1810 one-fourth of the thread needed by the cotton industry was being supplied from domestic sources, and shortly thereafter Switzerland became wholly independent of foreign supply. Although craftsmen of the cottage industry resisted mechanization—sometimes violently—machine production was also introduced for weaving cloth.

The pattern of Switzerland’s future economic life was taking shape. Swiss industry had to export in order to grow. It was dependent on inexpensive labour and cheap raw materials, both of which the country lacked and needed to import. Free trade was therefore a necessity. The dangers of foreign protectionism were met by increasing specialization, scientific and technical progress, and more-intensive occupational training rather than by retaliatory tariffs. Swiss companies also began opening plants in other countries.

The liberal triumph

On the political level the half century spanning from 1798 to 1848 can be considered a lasting crisis of transition. The Mediation Act had disappeared with Napoleon’s demise, its place taken by the Federal Pact, which once again established Switzerland as a confederation of sovereign states united only for common defense and the maintenance of internal order. Thus, the formulation and execution of a united foreign policy was still impossible. In addition, the Swiss were separated by legal barriers—each canton had its own laws, currency, postal service, system of weights and measures, and army. The right to reside freely in any canton had also ended along with the Mediation Act, and the inhabitants of each canton therefore regarded those of the other cantons as nationals of different countries. Furthermore, civil liberties were almost nonexistent, and religious differences reappeared, as the Roman Catholic hierarchy abandoned some of its earlier positions and sided firmly with reactionary antimodernism.

But the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris inspired the so-called “Regeneration” reform movements, which organized popular assemblies in the industrialized countryside, even as the cantonal capitals, along with their guilds and patricians, remained conservative. Petitions for liberal constitutions were signed, and in most cantons the patricians renounced power in favour of popular sovereignty and equality for the rural population. Yet, Basel and—for a short time—Schwyz were split into two half cantons because their elites tried to withhold these rights from the entire population, even at the price of civil war. Thus, a group of strong liberal cantons, led by Bern, Zürich, and Lucerne, opposed an alliance of conservative cantons that included the Catholic forest cantons, along with Protestant Basel and Neuchâtel. On a national level, this polarization made it impossible to replace the Federal Pact of 1815 with a liberal constitution drawn up in 1832.

Both conservative and liberal legal and revolutionary changes occurred in the cantons during the 1830s. When the radical wing of the liberals suppressed convents in Aargau in 1841, Lucerne turned conservative and invited the Jesuits to its schools. The radicals responded by launching two unsuccessful guerrilla attacks against Lucerne. Thus, the political conflict was infused with confessionalism, and in 1845 the Catholic cantons formed the separatist defensive league known as the Sonderbund, comprising Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Zug, Fribourg, and Valais. Still, two other Catholic cantons, Solothurn and Ticino, along with several religiously mixed ones, sided with the majority and thus proved that the conflict was essentially political and not religious. In July 1847 the Diet, representing the majority of liberal cantons, declared the Sonderbund to be incompatible with the Federal Pact and demanded its dissolution. A 25-day civil war erupted, and the result was a complete victory for the forces of the confederation. Owing to the military superiority and moderation of the majority and their commander in chief, General Guillaume-Henri Dufour, few lives were lost. Nevertheless, the vanquished bitterly resented their humiliation, and, on a national level, political Catholicism retired into an oppositional “ghetto” until the end of the century. It was protected by the sovereignty of the conservative cantons, where Roman Catholics remained in power and fervently defended local autonomy and ecclesiastical rights against liberal-radical nationalism and centralism.

Immediately after their victory and while the suspicious conservative regimes in the neighbouring countries were embroiled in domestic revolutions, the Swiss liberals established the new federal constitution of 1848, the essential structure of which has remained unchanged. The constitution provided considerable national representation even for the small cantons, which maintained essential sovereign rights (taxation, jurisdiction, and education). It created a bicameral legislative system, modeled after that of the United States, which combined a council of cantons (Ständerat), with each canton entitled to two members, and the National Council (Nationalrat), whose members would be elected in equal proportion to the Swiss population. The constitution also established the Federal Council (Bundesrat), an executive consisting of seven equally entitled secretaries. A common foreign policy was finally possible, and the new federal state unified customs, currency, weights and measures, and the postal service. It also provided for the promotion of the national welfare and for the protection of civil rights and liberties—though these were not granted to Jews until 1866. Finally, in one of the parliament’s first decisions, Bern was chosen for the capital of the new country over Zürich, Switzerland’s largest city.

Switzerland from 1848 to the present

The year 1848 was a decisive turning point in Swiss history. Although internal conflict was not wholly eliminated thereafter, it was always settled within the framework of the 1848 federal constitution. The liberals and radicals, who completely dominated the state in the 19th century and remained a leading force into the 21st century, gradually and not always willingly integrated other political and social groups into the government: first the conservative Catholics, then the peasants’ party, and finally, during World War II, the socialists. Enjoying internal political stability and spared from war—phenomena unmatched elsewhere in Europe—the Swiss focused much of their attention and efforts on developing industry, agriculture, communications, and the financial sector.

Economic expansion

The unification of Switzerland’s economy was aided by the development of a rail network that rapidly expanded as soon as the new constitution had been approved. In 1847 the first railroad opened between Zürich and Baden. Because of the influence of the “railway barons,” the most prominent of whom was Alfred Escher from Zürich, the railways were built through competition between private entrepreneurs rather than in accordance with some central plan. The result was an extensive network of small and medium-sized lines that were barely coordinated but covered more than 600 miles (1,000 km) of track by 1860 and twice that amount by 1876. The Swiss eventually voted in 1898 to nationalize the main lines, and in 1902 the Swiss Federal Railways (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen) was formed.

To compete with the opening of the trans-Alpine Mount Cenis and Brenner Pass rail links, the Swiss negotiated construction of the Saint Gotthard Tunnel with Italian and German interests. After 10 years of excavation, marked by labour unrest and the death of some 167 workers, the 9.3-mile (15-km) tunnel—then the world’s longest—opened in 1882. Thus, the cantons of Uri and Ticino were connected by rail, and a direct line was inaugurated between Zürich and Milan. In the early years of the 20th century, the 12-mile (20-km) Simplon Tunnel and the 9-mile (14.5-km) Lötschberg Tunnel linking Bern to Brig were also opened to rail traffic.

To finance railway construction, Escher in 1856 founded one of Switzerland’s largest and most successful banks, the Kreditanstalt (now Credit Suisse). Six other large commercial banks were also established in the 1850s. Because these banks were mainly interested in large investments, reformers stimulated the creation of cantonal banks to provide credit for the general public. In other areas of economic, internal, and foreign politics too, the radical-democratic middle class opposed the liberal economic elites, whose interaction of industrial, financial, and political power tinged with nepotism was characteristic of the bourgeois capitalism of Escher’s time.

Another effect of the quick development of rail (and maritime) transportation was the growing importation of cheap cereals, which plunged Swiss agriculture into crisis. In 1850 more than half the grain consumed was produced domestically, but by 1914 that measure stood at about one-fifth; in the same period, the number of Swiss employed in agriculture dropped from more than half to one-fourth. In the economic depression of the 1870s, the textile industry also lost its predominant position, while other export industries (e.g., chemicals and machine building) profited from the expanding means of communication.

Internal challenge

In 1856–57 the young republic clashed with Prussia over Neuchâtel, and war seemed inevitable; but ultimately, the Prussian emperor renounced his hereditary rights to the former principality. Yet, despite some smaller incidents (such as the conflict over the territories of Savoy with Napoleon III in 1860 as well as a clash with German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1889), Switzerland’s foreign relations were relatively smooth in the second half of the 19th century. Even radical politicians started to regard armed but cautious neutrality as the appropriate role for a small country bounded by bellicose and increasingly stronger monarchies. This neutrality was maintained during the Franco-German War (1870–71), in which the problems of interning a French army on Swiss soil eventually led to military reforms along the Prussian model without abolishing the principle of a militia army.

Domestic challenges rather than foreign ones were typical during this period. Economic development caused a malaise among different social groups; for example, labourers suffered from difficult working conditions, and the precapitalist elites, rural masses, and urban craftsmen all were losing their traditional sources of income. Although they had different needs and goals, they all sought greater popular participation in government. This democratic movement was particularly strong in Zürich, where in 1869 it was able to impose direct elections of the government and popular referendum for all parliamentary bills. After similar success in other cantons, the reform movement passed at the national level the Factory Act of 1877, which heavily involved the federal government in social welfare for the first time. In 1874 an alliance of the new democratic party and the dominant radical-liberal groups secured passage of a revised federal constitution. The 1874 constitution introduced a substantial innovation: direct democracy became possible through referendum and was reinforced in 1891 through initiative, the right for citizens to place an issue before the public if they were able to secure enough signatures.

The new constitution also strengthened federal power over the army and in the areas of social and economic legislation and justice. Such centralist measures met with the opposition of not only the conservative cantons but also the francophone minority; together they managed to defeat a first draft for an amended constitution in 1872. The referendum over the 1874 constitution was won only against the backdrop of the Kulturkampf (German: “cultural struggle”), a Protestant-led movement to limit the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, which was further constrained by new constitutional articles. While the Protestant French-speaking cantons now voted for the changed constitution, the Catholic minority had responded to its defeat by systematically and successfully using the referendum weapon in the name of cantonal rights against any bill that could be deemed a unitarian measure. To avoid such obstruction and to give the bourgeois position more weight against the growing socialist movement, the dominant bloc of liberals, radicals, and democrats approached the conservatives, and in 1891 the first member of the Catholic conservative party joined the Federal Council. In the same year the confederation for the first time celebrated the 1291 treaty as the country’s founding, symbolizing the reconciliation of the former opponents who had fought against each other in the Sonderbund War in 1847.

World War I and economic crisis

Switzerland maintained its neutrality in World War I, but the conflict not only engendered heavy tensions between the Germanophone Swiss and their French- and Italian-speaking countrymen—the result of each group’s cultural identification with the combatants—but also cast a weighty burden on the working class. As part of the militia army, they were mobilized for long periods to guard Switzerland’s borders, but they received no compensation for their loss of wages. Moreover, the working class was also hurt by the government’s decision to finance defense efforts through the issue of currency, which caused a surge in inflation. Some Swiss did profit from the war, as the country’s persistent balance-of-payments deficit was reversed for the first time. In particular, the metallurgical, chemical, timber, and watchmaking industries furnished goods to both belligerent camps, while farmers benefited from increasing demand and prices.

Social tensions erupted at the end of the war. In November 1918 there was a national strike, which originated in Zürich. The federal government, fearing a Soviet-style Bolshevik revolution, mobilized a large number of loyal troops, especially from the countryside. Within three days the strike leaders, many of whom were arrested, capitulated without a fight. Because the strike coincided with a worldwide influenza epidemic that cost many lives among those who had been mobilized, bitter feelings against the working class lasted for generations, especially among the farmers. Nevertheless, some of the strikers’ claims were soon realized (e.g., the 48-hour workweek and improved benefits for the unemployed). Particularly important was a reform of the voting system; with the replacement of majoritarian voting by proportional representation in 1919, the liberals immediately lost the dominant parliamentary position that they had enjoyed since 1848. In short order a second conservative joined the Federal Council, and in 1929 a member of the peasants’ party was elected. Since the end of the 19th century, the Farmers’ Association, representing a clientele particularly struck by structural crisis and in favour of protectionism, already had been the most successful of the different lobbying groups that increasingly influenced federal politics.

The worldwide economic crisis after 1929 dramatically reduced Swiss exports. Many banks became insolvent, while the machine-building industry was resilient, particularly because in this time the Swiss railway lines were largely electrified and needed new machines. The domestic crisis peaked in 1936 when many workers—especially in the construction industry—were dismissed, and the national bank was forced to devalue the Swiss franc by 30 percent. The following year there was a breakthrough in the relationship between the metallurgical employers and the trade unions, both of which agreed to find compromises without violent confrontation. This agreement served as a model for other industries and henceforth ensured a high degree of social peace.

This economic rapprochement, which had political parallels, occurred against the backdrop of the growing danger of National Socialism in Germany. Its imitators in Switzerland, the so-called Fronten (“fronts”), were loud but weak: in 1935, at their peak, they had only one representative in a national parliament of 187. Like the communists on the left, they were considered a fifth column, the agents of a foreign power. After some time the Social Democrats—who had largely been pacifists since World War I or antimilitary since the troops’ intervention in the general strike—joined the bourgeois parties in 1935 to authorize the arming of a comparatively outdated army. After World War I Switzerland had joined the Geneva-based League of Nations, which accorded it the special status of “differentiated neutrality,” excluding Switzerland from participation in collective military measures. As the fascist countries became increasingly aggressive and the Western powers barely reacted, the federal government looked for good foreign relations with its totalitarian neighbours; indeed, Switzerland was among the first countries to recognize Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia under Benito Mussolini and the Spanish regime of Francisco Franco. After the political union (Anschluss) of Austria by Germany in 1938, Switzerland returned to absolute neutrality, as the system of collective security revealed itself to be incapable of protecting minor states.

World War II and the Cold War

When World War II broke out, Switzerland mobilized 450,000 soldiers and 200,000 auxiliaries (it eventually mobilized 850,000 people out of a total population of 4,000,000). Having learned from World War I, the government provided compensation to workers for lost wages, and, despite economic difficulties, it was able to keep inflation at a tolerable level throughout the war. Another difference from World War I was the unity evident throughout Switzerland, irrespective of class and language. Symbolic of this singularity of purpose was the election of the first Social Democrat to the Federal Council in 1943. The most difficult phase of the war was in the summer of 1940, when France had unexpectedly fallen and Switzerland was surrounded by the Axis powers. The only open tunnel to Vichy France closed in late 1942 when Germany occupied the southern part of France. When most Swiss feared that they would become the next victim of Nazi expansionism, federal councillor Marcel Pilet-Golaz gave a speech on June 25, 1940, that generally was interpreted as an adaptation to the new Europe controlled by Germany. Many Swiss refused accommodation, and, in a speech given the following month to the army’s highest officers at the symbolic Rütli plateau, the commander in chief of the Swiss army, General Henri Guisan, expressed a lasting spirit of military resistance; in addition, a fortress in the central Alps, the réduit, was equipped with ammunition, medical supplies, food, water, hydroelectric plants, and factories to enable the Swiss army to fight the Nazis even if the cities of the Mittelland were captured.

In the days following Guisan’s speech, Switzerland signed the first of several toughly negotiated commercial treaties with Germany. The Germans supplied raw materials (coal, iron, and seeds for a country that produced only 60 percent of the food it needed) in exchange for considerable Swiss financial credits and military and strategic material produced by private companies, including aluminum, machine tools, and watches. Weapons (e.g., antiaircraft defense) made up a significant share of Switzerland’s exports to Germany; though they constituted less than 1 percent of Germany’s own armaments, these supplies may have been important at specific moments of the war. It was the national bank, however, that rendered the most problematic service to Germany, buying gold looted from western European central banks, including small quantities of victims’ gold from concentration camps. Although historical evidence suggests that the Swiss did not know the origins of this gold, by at least early 1943 the Swiss national bank was aware of the German looting of central banks yet continued to buy the melted and reformed gold in large quantities until 1944 and in lesser amounts even until the last weeks of the war. The total amount the Swiss national bank paid to Germany for mostly looted gold was 1.2 billion Swiss francs; Germany used this money—its only remaining convertible currency—to purchase missing raw materials from abroad.

Transit through the Alps benefited the Axis but generally conformed to international law, which allows shipments other than those of weapons or troops; by far the most important shipment was of coal. Despite its geographic location, Switzerland also maintained economic relations with the Western Allies during the war; for example, it bought a considerable amount of (nonlooted) gold from the United States and Britain. The Allies then used Swiss francs to pay for intelligence services in Switzerland and for the good offices the neutral country could provide through the Red Cross for prisoners of war. Humanitarian policy, however, was the saddest—yet most ambivalent—chapter of Switzerland’s war history. To a large extent, the alleged humanitarian tradition of a neutral minor state was given over to the initiative of private persons and charitable organizations. The government itself declared a restrictive immigration policy, admitting refugees essentially for transit into a third country but without pursuing this policy consistently. There were several reasons for the harsh policy against refugees; one was the fear that immigration might provoke social unrest, especially given the country’s weak labour market after the economic crises. Officials further adduced the economic costs of accommodation—the lack of food and impediments for national defense—but anti-Semitism and the fear that the country might lose its character as a result of Überfremdung (“overforeignization”) also were decisive factors. During the war Switzerland accepted nearly 300,000 refugees—one-third of whom were military internees, while many others, especially children, arrived only for a short period or, especially from the neighbouring areas, only in the last weeks of the war. Among the roughly 55,000 civilian refugees, about 20,000 were Jews, who were denied asylum because they were not considered “political refugees.” During the war, especially in 1942–43, when the Swiss border was officially but not hermetically sealed, at least another 20,000 civilian refugees, most of them Jewish, were turned away. It is probably impossible to establish the precise number of those who were killed in concentration camps after a vain attempt to flee to Switzerland.

Judging Switzerland’s role during the war is complex. Switzerland appeased the Axis, but it also was ready to defend its independence in the event of a German attack. Moreover, there were many examples of compassion toward refugees and other victims of the war, and the Swiss had to balance the interest of other countries and peoples with its attempt to ensure its own national survival. While some profited from trade with the Axis, the Swiss in general rejected those regimes and their racist ideology, considering these a mortal danger for their democracy and diverse linguistic and religious population.

The postwar period

At the end of the war, Swiss politics and neutrality were internationally compromised because Switzerland had maintained relations with Nazi Germany until its demise. The Soviet Union only reluctantly accorded diplomatic recognition to Switzerland, which had been a herald of anticommunism in the interwar period. In a 1946 agreement the Western Allies, especially the United States, compelled Switzerland to compensate the looted western European central banks, requiring the payment of some 250 million Swiss francs. Because Switzerland would have received no special recognition of its neutrality, the Federal Council decided not to join the United Nations (UN), which nonetheless occupied offices in Geneva. Joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the U.S.-led Western alliance, was never a serious option for a country that believed armed neutrality had been the best defense against Nazism and would also save the country from communism. The Cold War allowed Switzerland to again become a respectable member of the international community. Neutrality enabled it to play a mediating role between the two antagonistic camps, but, as a capitalist democracy with a strong citizens’ army, it was a tacit member of the noncommunist world and one of its key defenders. An interesting and complicated mixture of neutrality, isolationism, solidarity, anticommunism, and militarism became the common, often complacent ideology of most Swiss, be they bourgeois or socialist.

In 1959 the so-called Zauberformel (“magic formula”) for the Federal Council was established, under which it was composed of two liberals, two conservatives, two Social Democrats, and one member of the peasant-based Swiss People’s Party. This formula, which persisted until 2003, permitted the government to sidestep party rivalries to distribute Switzerland’s growing wealth and build a strong social welfare state. For a long period after World War II, the undamaged Swiss economy experienced very little unemployment, and it grew approximately 5 percent per year in the 1950s and ’60s. During this period, foreign policy was virtually reduced to negotiating bilateral trade agreements. Because Switzerland avoided multilateral ties that could affect its sovereignty, it resisted European integration efforts. Thus, it did not join the European Economic Community (now later succeeded by the European Community, part of the European Union [EU]); instead it was a founding member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1960. Switzerland’s economic growth rapidly changed the landscape and the living standard, helping to perpetuate the image of the country as a special case (Sonderfall). It renounced bilateralism only slowly and gradually within “apolitical” international bodies, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1966), the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (1992), and the World Trade Organization (1995).

Switzerland’s strong economy attracted many immigrants, first from Italy and Spain and after 1980 from Yugoslavia and Turkey. Xenophobic political parties began to attract significant support about 1970, though initiatives to reduce the number of foreign labourers were narrowly defeated. Nonetheless, during the 1970s many foreign workers, particularly those in construction and watchmaking, were forced to leave as a result of sector restructuring and rationalization. By 2000, however, foreign citizens constituted nearly one-fifth of Switzerland’s population. (This high proportion resulted in large measure from the legal and political difficulties involved in naturalization.)

Switzerland also has kept a conservative approach to several other issues. For example, women were enfranchised on the national level only in 1971, and in the canton of Appenzell they had to wait until 1990 for full voting rights. Relatively late, in 1981, an equal rights amendment was added to the constitution, and in 1985 the rather patriarchal marriage law was amended. Another problem that had lasted for decades was resolved pragmatically in 1978, when a national referendum authorized Jura, a French-speaking Catholic area of the Protestant canton of Bern, to form its own canton.

The 1968 student revolt common throughout the West left its traces in the country, but the bourgeois majority furiously rejected its Marxist ideas. However, changes in lifestyles, gender relations, and the popular culture did not spare the Helvetic island, and the successful opposition against an atomic power station near Basel was one trigger of a strong environmental movement. A youth rebellion, originating in 1980 in Zürich, caught international interest, as did “Needle Park,” a temporarily free market for drugs, years later.

Recent developments

In the 1990s Switzerland was one of the world’s wealthiest and most prosperous countries, and neutrality, still the country’s official doctrine, became much more complicated. In 1986 some three-fourths of voters rejected entry into the UN, despite the endorsement of membership by most mainstream politicians. Though opposed to joining the association, Switzerland sided with the UN against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91). In a later referendum, in 2002, a very slight majority approved entry into the UN. Yet, the changed proportions show that decisive and seemingly contradictory changes occurred in a few years. In 1989, for example, some one-third of voters endorsed a referendum proposing the abolition of the Swiss army, which had been considered the untouchable backbone of Swiss sovereignty. On the other hand, in 1992 Swiss voters narrowly turned down membership in a European Economic Area that comprised the EU and EFTA. Because most EFTA members had joined the EU, Switzerland was politically isolated within Europe at the beginning of the 21st century. However, it maintained strong bilateral economic ties with the EU, which was by far its largest trading partner. In 2008 Switzerland acceded to the Schengen Agreement, a European convention aimed at reducing international border controls between member countries. While there was significant popular opposition to joining the Schengen area, proponents cited the benefits of decreased congestion at border checkpoints and access to the Schengen Information System (SIS), a database containing information about persons and goods traversing the Schengen zone.

At the end of the 20th century, growing doubts about Switzerland’s past and future emerged. Many Swiss questioned the country’s traditional “bunker mentality” in a Europe at peace and with open borders. Particularly troubling for Switzerland was an international debate during the 1990s about “dormant accounts”—assets left by Jews in Swiss banks during the Nazi era but never returned—a controversy that challenged Switzerland’s image of itself and resulted in a settlement between two large commercial banks and Jewish plaintiffs in which the banks agreed to pay international Jewish organizations 2 billion Swiss francs.

As a result of such debates and structural changes, the political arena has become much more polarized between advocates and opponents of a quick integration into supranational structures, especially the EU. After years of spectacular growth, the Swiss People’s Party, which since the 1990s had adopted policies that were perceived as antiforeigner and anti-European, became the largest party in the Federal Assembly following the federal elections in 2003 and subsequently was awarded an additional seat on the Federal Council, signaling a significant alteration in the balance of political power. In 2007 the Swiss People’s Party became the first opposition party in nearly 50 years when it withdrew from the country’s long-standing governing coalition. The departure of the far-right party shifted the government toward the political centre. In December 2008, however, the legislature chose Ueli Maurer of the Swiss People’s Party to replace an outgoing member of the Federal Council, thereby returning the far right to the country’s traditional coalition government.

Switzerland, which has had one of the most successful national histories in Europe, faces unique problems in a time of peace and prosperity. Its archaic aspects—such as the autonomous communes that form the basis of Swiss citizenship—reflect political continuities that have endured despite often dramatic social change. For a long time the Swiss have attributed their good fortune to their own virtues, especially democracy, federalism, political moderation and stability, neutrality, humanitarianism, valour, and diligence. However, Swiss exceptionalism appears more and more questionable. Moreover, the controversies over Switzerland’s historical role have challenged its self-image as an island of virtue. Yet, for a people of diverse cultures and languages, political uniqueness has largely constituted national identity. Can this country based on a sense of otherness survive in its present form, or will its different linguistic regions join their big neighbours on linguistic grounds if Switzerland should further renounce its sovereignty and join the EU?